Re: How about releasing an update of xorg-x11-drv-intel for Fedora 11

Subject: Re: How about releasing an update of xorg-x11-drv-intel for Fedora 11

Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:37:19 -0700

On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 14:05 +0100, Terry Barnaby wrote:
> No, I don't what to force testing on anyone (although F11 has done
> that
> already :) )
> I was just suggesting that a separate yum archive with the packages
> necessary
> to test the later graphics development code that will be in F12 could
> be
> made available for people to try out easily with their F11 systems.
> They can optionally try these. I think it will allow 3D to work for
> many people
> (from my experience of the latest GIT versions) although others would
> not be so
> lucky. They can easily back these changes out if they have more issues
> than
> the standard graphics system.
Then please feel free to make one. :) I don't mean that in a snide
fashion, but it really is the answer. As noted, having our X.org
developers spend time on such a repository directly subtracts that
amount of time from the time they would otherwise spend actually
developing the drivers (our X.org maintainers are also major upstream
developers) and fixing reported bugs.
Given that there is a lot of development work to do on these drivers
(which is why you find the newer versions better...) and a lot of bugs
to fix (we generally barely keep up with the rate of bugs filed as it
is), we don't see that as a good trade-off. You'd get backported drivers
for stable releases, but the rate of development of the actual upstream
drivers would be noticeably slowed, and fewer reported bugs would
ultimately get fixed.
Backporting packages is not intrinsically very difficult, though it is
somewhat time-consuming, so it's something for which a far greater
candidate pool exists than X driver development. Thus, the suggestion
that someone else do it. For instance, you. It seems you've already
successfully built the latest versions of things locally; if you can do
that, you can put them in a package and put the package in a repository,
it's not a very hard process and it's all documented on the Wiki.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net